Upgrade from El Capitan to Sierra went smoothly for me with 2 exceptions:
1.) NVIDA drivers. This was an easy fix. Downloaded BETA versions from NVIDIA and life was good after a restart.
2.) AUDIO: No Audio devices found. I tried to decipher the post from toleda found here:
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/no-audio-devices-realtek-alc-applehda-guide.143752/ but it was above my pay grade. I downloaded the various tools but the closest thing I see to audio devices in DPCIManager is this:
10DE, 0FBA, 3842, 2957, NVIDIA Corporation That seems a bit odd as NVIDIA doesn't sound like the right answer to me.
BIG HINT: I was an idiot and failed to this the first time:
--> Press spacebar to enter Boot Options and choose Without Caches option and/or Inject Kexts
The boot happened too quickly for me. D'oh!
I did this after I fixed the NVIDIA issue but the audio issue is still out there.
Any wizards with the easy fix?
THANKS!!!
-=-=-
Additional info: From my bootlog:
0:100 0:000 - HDMI Audio:
0:100 0:000 PCI (00|00:14.00) : 8086 A12F class=0C0330
0:100 0:000 PCI (00|00:14.02) : 8086 A131 class=118000
0:100 0:000 PCI (00|00:16.00) : 8086 A13A class=078000
0:100 0:000 PCI (00|00:17.00) : 8086 A102 class=010601
0:100 0:000 PCI (00|00:1B.00) : 8086 A167 class=060400
0:100 0:000 PCI (00|00:1B.02) : 8086 A169 class=060400
0:100 0:000 PCI (00|04:00.00) : 168C 0030 class=028000
.
.
.
30:871 0:000 Audio HDA (addr:0x1F0003) setting specified layout-id=1 (0x1)
30:871 0:000 Audio HDA (addr:0x1F0003) setting specified layout-id=1 (0x1)
30:871 0:000 Patching DSDT:
30:871 0:000 - [00]: pattern 48444153, patched at: [ (9CE3) (2021) (86) (D) (A1) (76) ]
-=-=-=-=-=-
FIXED!!!
A couple of things:
1.) EFI partition was empty because... for some reason, the drives/volumes were moving around. What was previously disk0s1 moved to disk1s1.
2.) Once that was done, if I updated audio using toledo's audio_cloverALC-120_v1.0b0, it stepped on my video. so,
3.) rebooted with disabled nvidia drivers. this, of course, produces slow graphics response (paging windows, etc.) but then,
4.) rebooted again with empty cache, injected kexts, nvidia driver and... Magic! Everything appears to be running as expected/hoped in Sierra.